Tales of women on the edge of the partnership-domination continuum: Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale

By naming her book, The Chalice and the Blade, Riane Eisler directly focuses the attention on the central point of her theory. As a matter of fact, the two composing elements of the title, symbolise the turning point during the prehistory of Western civilization which changed the path of our cultural evolution. Societies that worshipped the life-generating and nurturing forces of the universe – embodied by the ancient Chalice – were overthrown by societies otherwise devoted to "the lethal power of the Blade", as archaeologist Marija Gimbutas stated, more attracted to life-taking as a means to establish and enforce domination. Throughout history men have fought wars seeking for dominion through destruction, fear and death, hence making the Blade a male epitome. This does not mean that men are inevitably violent and belligerent. Who we are is shaped through the interaction of our genes with our environment over the course of early development and into adulthood. Our past is filled with examples of peaceful men, whose aim was to perpetuate love and welfare in harmony with women and children: one of the most prominent examples is that of Jesus, who lived by partnership ideals, passing them to others through his words and actions. Accordingly, the root of the problem does not lie in men as a sex, rather in a social system in which the power of the Blade is idealised, where both men and women are taught to equate true masculinity with violence and dominance and to see men who do not conform to this ideal as "too soft" or "effeminate". Evidently, this kind of social organisation is damaging for everybody. People have to conform to specific roles and behaviours, respect rankings and rules imposed with force, necessary to maintain order and control. This does not imply, however, that in more equalitarian societies there are no rules or social structures and institutions. To better understand this, Eisler makes a distinction between hierarchies of domination, imposed and maintained through fear and force, and hierarchies of actualisation, in which leadership and governance aim to enabling rather than disabling power, and the goal coincides with higher levels of agency. [...]